by kmihelich » Thu Jan 19, 2012 3:20 am
There are important things that need to be distinguished. We build the main repos (core, extra, and community) from packages tracked upstream. If Arch dumps something from what they track, we dump it. If they add something, we add it. This happens automatically, and builds of these packages are queued in correct dependency order. There's more to it than this of course, but that's the main idea you need to understand. Some PKGBUILDs are designed too-x86 sometimes, or require specific ARM patches, and those end up in github. What's there in core/extra/community replaces what comes from upstream, but when Arch upgrades one of those packages we get notified through the build system that we need to upgrade ours.
AUR is an entirely separate thing from this mechanism. We don't have any automatic package version checking in place against AUR packages, and the only reason they're there is because of high demand from the community and because we understand that building packages on ARM without the kind of setup we use for cross-compiling, among other things, can just suck. However, it does take time to go through and check these packages for version bumps, time that doesn't become available often (we don't get paid for this, remember). So for AUR, I rely a lot on the community here to let me know that something has gone out of date or needs a rebuild.
What also needs distinguishing is what ends up being our problem, and what is something that propagates from upstream. If something is Arch's fault, which is pretty rare, chances are someone up there is working the issue and you probably won't even run into it. An example of this would be a bad PKGBUILD that got released into ABS that didn't build for them, and thus won't build for us, and you probably would never see any kind of negative outcome. This forum is also the place to post about problems, not Arch's mailing lists or bug tracker. Though if you actually want to get my attention you'll file an issue on github, but in that case it has to be a real issue, not user error.
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